Thursday 23 April 2009

Hell is for children

funny-games

I've always thought that Michael Haneke's Funny Games would make an excellent picture book for 3-5 year olds. An article in yesterday's Guardian only confirms this impression.

(Apologies to Polly Dunbar for appropriating Tilly and Friends for Prozac's sadistic impulses.)

Thursday 9 April 2009

The nature of love

sharp-shock-to-your-soft-si

In 1957 Harry Harlow devised an experiment designed to take a pop at psychoanalytic drive theories of bonding ("Mummy gratifies my hunger. I love Mummy"). He wrote up his findings in a paper bearing the tongue-in-cheek title The Nature of Love.

The experiment proceeded thus: infant rhesus monkeys were separated at birth from their mothers and reared with the help of surrogate wire 'mothers' to which feeding bottles had been attached. 

Harlow2

The monkeys were also presented with another ‘mother’, this one without the feeding bottle, but covered with soft terry nappy material.

Harlow1

The infant monkeys showed a clear preference for the cuddly mothers, clinging to these surrogates for 18 hours a day (as they would to a real mother) even though they were fed exclusively from the wire mother and even ‘punished’ with sudden blasts of compressed air as they clung to the cloth stand-ins.

Saturday 4 April 2009

Lay me down

invitation-to-my-funeral
Design for my funeral invitation: front of card (above), inside of card (below)

invitation-to-my-funeral-(i

Now that I am a Property Owner, methinks I need a will.

This has also given me the pleasure of being able to work out 
the nuts and bolts of my funeral. If you're in the UK when it happens, consider yourself invited. The more the merrier etc.

Thursday 2 April 2009

So far around the bend

The-idPod
[Soundtrack]

Nadler's orginal drawing for The idPod
And the detailed open-source techinal bumf on how the software actually works (just in case you feel like adding it to some headwear of your choice).

Wednesday 1 April 2009

Someone like you and all you know and how to speak

april-fool-2009

Saw Karima Francis playing a gig at Bush Hall two weeks ago. Heart-breaking/rending stuff.